the time between rulers; a space between; the gap after one epoch ends and another begins; the tumultuous and exciting period after scholarly boundaries become fluid and before new academic disciplines are fully defined; the blog of New York University's Draper Program

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Seats are running out for our GRE, LSAT, and MCAT Free Practice Tests on 2/26 here at NYU so please sign-up today and reserve your spot! Information for registration is at the end of this message.

Kaplan's free Practice Test Event is coming in February! After the test, one of our amazing instructors will give a short workshop on test-taking strategies, as well as provide you same day results, including your score and section performance. This opportunity is only once for the remainder of this school year, so take advantage of it now. To register, visit 2011 Spring National Practice Test -- http://www.jotform.com/form/10060420151

In French and English. Simultaneous translation available for this event.

The conversations between French and American authors that constitute the seven one-hour sessions of the Festival of New French Writing will each pair one French and one American writer, confronting their respective experiences and ambitions with respect to literary creation. Each animated by an American cultural critic familiar with the literatures of the two countries, the dialogues will explore the singular qualities of each author, national similarities and differences, as well as the future of literature.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The 'African' in the African Writers Series: Questions of Blackness, Realism and Literary Production

Dr. Ibironke holds a PhD in English (2008) from Michigan State University, and an MA in Comparative Literature from MSU. He specializes in African and African Diaspora Literatures. His dissertation examines the role of the publishing house Heinemann in the creation of an international reading-market for African novels. He has held a Big 10 CIC Postdoctoral Fellowship and is currently Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

The Graduate Forum, now entering its tenth year, is accepting applications from students across New York University for participation beginning in September 2011.

The Graduate Forum was established to encourage interdisciplinary inquiry into intellectual and moral problems, to question the foundations of the disciplines, and to experiment in translating basic research into a language accessible to a variety of audiences without oversimplification. Over the course of their tenure Forum members become part of an intellectual community that fosters creative cross-disciplinary discourse. At monthly dinners held during the academic year, Forum members make formal presentations of their work and enjoy genuinely interdisciplinary dialogue in sessions moderated by Acting Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, Malcolm Semple, joined by Assistant Dean for the Office of Academic and Student Life, Kathleen Talvacchia, and facilitated by Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, and an alumna of the Graduate Forum.

Graduate students interested in participating in the Forum should submit an application by Tuesday March 8, 2011. Applications should consist of a letter of no more than 500 words describing your interest in the Forum and why you would make a good member, a curriculum vitae and a copy of your graduate transcript (unofficial copies are accepted). In addition, all nominations should include a letter of recommendation from at least one NYU faculty member who can comment on the student’s ability to contribute to the Forum. Students whose work addresses modes of visual representation and their products in any culture or period should consider applying to the more specialized Forum on Forms of Seeing, which is co-sponsored by GSAS and the IFA.

Considerations for selection include a promising academic record, the capacity for innovative thinking, the ability to contribute to interdisciplinary inquiry, and an interest in the new technologies of education.Each Forum member will be paid an honorarium of $500 per semester for her or his active participation. Student membership in the Forum is for a term of two academic years, unless a student graduates earlier. The Forum strongly encourages applications from students of diverse racial, ethnic, national and/or cultural backgrounds. Please refer to our website ( www.nyu.edu/ graduate.forum) for more information on past and present members as well as our meetings.

Nominations for membership beginning in the 2011 academic year will be due on Friday, March 11, 2011. They should be submitted electronically to Anna Antoniak at anna.antoniak@nyu.edu. The selection process may include interviews conducted in early April by current Forum members. Dean Semple will extend offers for membership by late April for a term to begin at the September 2011 Graduate Student Forum meeting.

The Graduate School of Arts and Science and the Institute of Fine Arts are pleased to invite nominations and applications for a specialized interdisciplinary forum for graduate students whose work addresses modes of visual representation and their products. Focused on the ways in which cultures give form to visual experience, the Forum on Forms of Seeing aims to bring together students from a wide range of graduate programs. Applications are encouraged from students who have strong historical and/or theoretical interests in images and visuality in the broadest sense, and who wish to become closely familiar with other disciplines concerned with visual representation.

Over the past few decades, many disciplines have become interested in “visuality” as a wider natural and cultural phenomenon that includes not only the traditional fine arts but imaging practices of all kinds, from cinema and popular print culture to digital reality techniques and scientific modeling. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Literary Criticism, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience have taken significant interest in the concept of the visual, and relatively young disciplines such as Cinema Studies and Visual Studies or Visual Culture put visual representation at the center of their research. Art History itself has become more cognizant of the limitations of traditional medium-bound definitions of the image, and has taken up a more fluidly-defined visuality as one of its central problems. Reflecting the dramatic expansion of visuality as a category for scholarly inquiry, the Forum invites applications for membership from any graduate program at NYU.

How images in different periods and cultures imitate, model, render, or critique the world and our visual apprehension of it, for their makers and for their viewers, will be of central interest to the Forum. This historical and comparative approach may profitably be complemented by a philosophical understanding of the image as record of, or model for, acts of seeing. The creation, dissemination, function, signification, efficacy, duration, destruction, and demise of images will be welcome topics for the Forum.

Meeting Format

Membership in the Forum on Forms of Seeing will be for one academic year, commencing in September 2011 and ending in April 2012. All eight members will present and critique work in progress during monthly, moderated lunch sessions, scheduled on Fridays, from 12 – 3 p.m., at Washington Square and the Institute of Fine Arts. The meetings will culminate in a one-day event at the end of the semester, showcasing the year’s presentations. Members are expected to attend every session and to participate in the end-of-year symposium. A stipend of $500 is distributed per semester.

Application Procedure

To apply for membership in the 2011-12 Forum on Forms of Seeing, please provide a one-page statement of your scholarly interest in visual representation and the relevance of interdisciplinary debate about visuality for your graduate work.Your application should include a current transcript (unofficial is fine), CV, and a recommendation by a NYU faculty member. Please submit your completed application electronically by end-of-day Monday, April 4 to Anna Antoniak at anna.antoniak@nyu.edu.

The Forum on Forms of Seeing is supported by the Office of the Provost, the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and the Institute of Fine Arts and its Alumni Association.

Call for Papers: Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) invites the submission of proposals for papers that address the core themes of its project on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life (described below). Accepted papers will be presented at a public conference at Columbia University, to be held June 3-4, 2011. Please email an abstract (of 300-500 words) and a CV to religion@ssrc.org (subject line: “SPEPL Conference Paper”) by March 1, 2011. Submissions will be reviewed by members of the SSRC Working Group on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life, and selected papers will be announced by April 15, 2011. Completed papers (of 6,000 to 8,000 words) must be submitted by May 15, 2011, as they will be circulated in advance and discussed in detail at the conference. Limited funding will be available to conference participants for travel and lodging.

Project on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life

Building on recent scholarship, and with support from the Ford Foundation, the SSRC project on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life explores the institutions and traditions that construct, condition, and demarcate spiritual activities and identities, and it considers the relations of these institutions and traditions to systems and patterns of political participation in the contemporary United States. In so doing, the project engages with multiple streams of scholarship and responds to recent public controversies over competing visions of the role of religion in U.S. public life.

Opinion polls show that the percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation is rising, although belief in a divine order and some form of deity has declined only slightly. Furthermore, belief in various non-orthodox, or non-Western, religious ideas—from reincarnation to the “mind-body connection”—is becoming increasingly popular. In sum, it seems that many Americans have begun to identify, at least nominally, as spiritual, while having become less likely to affiliate with recognized religious traditions. Meanwhile, academic work on civic associations continues to highlight the various religious and spiritual underpinnings of American political life. In light of these recent trends and developments, the project asks:

What are the consequences of the increasing salience of “spirituality” for American civic and political life? Do actors and groups publicly identified as spiritual challenge commonly held understandings of social and political involvement? How strongly are they committed to any particular set of political goals or ideals of citizenship? How do they engage in public life, and do their patterns of involvement differ in a systematic way from the patterns of others? What kinds of alternatives to, or cautionary tales about, dominant understandings of political engagement might political expressions of “spirituality” present?

Submissions for the conference should address issues related to these broad questions. In so doing, authors are encouraged to pay careful attention to the following considerations. First, the project has addressed spirituality in America as an historical phenomenon with various traditions, legacies, and institutional frameworks that shape its participants’ conceptions of religion, politics, and culture. Second, while the project recognizes that spirituality is often linked to politically “liberal” or “progressive” registers of civic expression (in contrast, for example, to “conservative” religion), there are many instances that counter this association; likewise, there are many examples of spiritual projects serving the reproduction of dominant norms and institutions. Third, the project is acutely aware that the boundaries between religious and spiritual forms are continually contested, and that this contestation itself is often an enactment of strategies that make room for various incipient public projects.

Social Science Research Council

The Social Science Research Council is an independent nonprofit organization devoted to the advancement of social science research and scholarship. Founded in New York City in 1923 as the world’s first national coordinating body of the social sciences, today the SSRC is an international resource for innovative, interdisciplinary public social science. Through its Program on Religion and the Public Sphere, the SSRC seeks to deepen engagement and cooperation among social scientists working on religion, secularism, and related topics; to support critical scholarship in this crucial area of study; and to increase public awareness of the social and political dimensions and ramifications of religion in the contemporary world.

Theories of Life in the 20th and 21st Centuries Rutgers Interdisciplinary Humanities Conference

"Theories of Life in the 20th and 21st Centuries" brings together scholars from across the humanities to investigate the centrality of theories of "life" to twentieth and twenty-first century theory and cultural production. In fields as diverse as vitalism, feminism, animal studies, political theory, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, presenters will highlight how the humanities investigates the ontological properties and ethical imperatives of life.

Plenary Speaker: Donna V. Jones, UC-Berkeley English: "The Career of Living Things is Continuous"

- “The Vitalist Debate in American Literature, 1950-2000”- John McClure, Rutgers University English - “Nietzschean Vitalism in German Musical Modernism”- Jonathan Gentry, Brown University History - - “The Limits of Life in the 20th and 21st Century: The Fetus and the Refugee”- Heather Latimer, University of Manchester, English and American Studies - “History in the Service of Life: Nietzsche and Deleuze” - Allison M. Merrick, University of Southampton, Philosophy